Jim Allister

There is an old proverb—it might be of Russian extraction, which would be fitting enough—that says, “Tell me who your friend is, and I will tell you who you are.” Doesn’t that sum up Peter Mandelson? The friend of the child abuser. The friend of Jeffrey Epstein. He is the living personification of that proverb. He is a man apparently so corrupted in his own morals that he thinks what he did was okay, and is perhaps corrupted financially. That corruption, of course, is the product of his intoxication as a freeloader on the rich and the powerful. Peter Mandelson has brought us to a very sorry pass indeed, but the abiding two words that will live from today relate to the Prime Minister, and they are: he knew. Those words will long outlive this debate. He knew, when he appointed Peter Mandelson, that he had that ongoing relationship with Epstein. He told us today that he did not know the depth of the relationship. Sorry, but it is not about depth. It is not a question of scale. It is a question of whether there was a relationship, and the very fact that there was should have been enough for any Prime Minister. That calls into question fundamentally the judgment of our Prime Minister. Our Prime Minister has to make fine judgments on the world stage. Day and daily, he has to make judgments that affect us all. If, on a matter as glaring as this, his judgment is patently and fatally flawed, it raises fundamental questions as to how we can trust his judgment. Even those who knew Peter Mandelson tangentially would have had enough suspicion to question his appointment. We in Northern Ireland know something of him: he was our Secretary of State at the turn of the century for two years, until he had to resign over the passport application scandal. I then next encountered him when I was a Member of the European Parliament and he was the United Kingdom’s Trade Commissioner in the European Commission from 2004 to 2008. That was not uncontroversial. In 2006, I well remember in the European Parliament the controversy about the fact that he had been holidaying on a yacht with an Italian tycoon whose business had benefited from his imposition of EU anti-dumping tariffs on Chinese shoes. There he was, months later, on the businessman’s yacht. Two years later, he was on another yacht—must be something about yachts—in Corfu with an Russian oligarch. Mr Mandelson as Trade Commissioner had just cut the EU import tariffs on aluminium, benefiting the oligarch’s company Rusal, which was in the aluminium business.